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This page is designed to take over my current portfolio, as well as a place to dump all my works in progress. If you'd like to see my work, go to the Portfolio Page.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Lost in the Woods (Aka Golden Axe part 2)

Here's the rest! If you haven't guessed, this is a tribute to Golden Axe, one of my favorite games ever. This is a screenshot of the game I'm talking about:

This game genre is probably my favorite; beat'em up side scrolling RPG-type shit. TMNT, AVP, Dungeons and Dragons, The Simpsons arcade game, X-Men, I played all of those at my local arcades. The recent incarnations are Castle Crashers and soon to be Dragon Crown, the game that inspired me to do this painting.

Ya' see, I disagree on many levels with how they dealt with the most recent incarnation of the franchise, which is Golden Axe: Beast Rider. I'm sure the game play was horrible to merit the meta-critic score it received, but I didn't even play it because I immediately got try-hard vibes and ignored it... and I LOVE Golden Axe! I think the entertainment industry often makes the mistake of trying too damn hard with revitalizing beloved but forgotten franchises, essentially trying to just reinvent them and put a loved title on it. They lose sight of why people play these sorts of games, and what the original art direction was, and what sort of characters people became attached to. It's a real shame. That's my I have such high hopes for games like Dragon Crown, because Vanillaware does genre-revitalizing awesomely.

Now, about the importance of keeping your original sketches. I was starting to dislike the way I had rendered the face. Something was lost that I had, and I didn't know what, so I put this painting down for like half a year. When I picked it up again, I went through the layers and realized I had kep the original drawing of Tyris Flare I had done as the basis for the painting:

I immediately liked this face more, so i made the decision to scrap the old head.

It just worked with how symmetrical her pose was, and was just more fierce of an expression. Although it's more rough in rendering right now, it is still stronger than the old one. Lesson learned: always keep your old sketches so you don't get lost in the woods with big paintings, and fix mistakes when you see them!